I returned my Mad Men costume to the magical fancy dress shop today (they never let me go out the door that leads to adventures though) and then walked through Soho towards the department stores of Oxford Street to see if I could find a new coat.
It's been a little while since I've done one of my London walks and I enjoyed taking a slightly different and winding route through the backstreets to see what I might chance across if I bothered to look around me.
I love looking out for the blue (and other memorial) plaques on the houses and seeing if I recognise the name commemorated or if like Ozymandius these once great people are now unknown and their hubris is revealed (not that they choose this honour). Or more likely I am just showing my own ignorance.
But if I do recognise the name then it's also a bit of a thrill to know that an historical figure walked these same streets and once peered out of those windows, irritated by someone making too much noise in the street below.
Today I walked up Great Pulteney Street and passed the former residence of John William Polidori who wrote "The Vampyre". I had never heard of him or his book, but wondered if he'd invented the genre that has been responsible for so very many books and films. I wondered if I should track down his book and read it on the recommendation of the plaque. After all it must have been quite a book to warrant this commemoration, even if that plaque had been there for a hundred and fifty years. I bet he thought he was great having written a book about a vampire (even though he didn't know how to spell it) and how stupid he would look if he'd known that just a couple of centuries later I'd walk past his house and know nothing about him. Take that you Ozymandius, vampire mis-spelling prick!
Later I looked
him up on wikipedia to discover that he was a reasonably big deal and I had no right to be ignorantly mocking him. I'd imagined the plaque had gone up in 1820 and since then everyone had forgotten him, but in fact it was put there in 1998 and Polidori was Lord Byron's doctor and the Vampyre owed its origins to that famous night that Byron and the Shelleys had challenged each other to write ghost stories. It's where Mary Shelley came up with her masterpiece "Frankingstein" (though she stupidly mis-spelled her own title as "Frankenstein") and Percy Bysshe Shelley came up with the sitcom Shelley. Byron came up with a fragment of a story that he later abandoned that Polidori used as the basis of "The Vampyre". In many ways he sounds like the Patrick Marber of his day. And I hope Patrick Marber will be similarly honoured when he is twenty years dead (you have to be to get a plaque). I look forward to seeing that plaque more than any other.
His book was initially attributed to Byron (which is sort of understandable - it looks like he was a bit of a literary groupie) and he died heavily in debt (and possibly by his own hand) at the age of just 25. What an interesting story and how stupid of me to know nothing about it. He wasn't the first to write about vampires, but he came close. Even if everyone else thought someone else did it anyway. He's my kind of guy. And it's good to know that someone like him can get his own plaque.
It made me want to find his book and check it out (in fact just found it for 0p on the kindle). Maybe if I steal the basic idea of him I will also end up with a memorial plaque on my house 170 years after my own untimely death. Fingers crossed.
I recorded the seventh Talking Cock podcast this afternoon. It should be up by Wednesday evening. It's a free for all, mainly based on email correspondence I've received, but I was in quite a skittish mood so it's nicely on the borderline of fun and insanity. I didn't get time to do a snooker podcast, but hoping to get that sorted out tomorrow morning!
